EMC Pitches Big Data As Huge Business Opportunity

EMC has been betting the farm on the opportunity in big data and continued its message at Oracle Open World.

According to CEO Joe Tucci and Executive Vice President, Product Operations and Marketing Jeremy Burton the intersection of cloud and big data will be having substantial impact for IT on the cloud side, but transform business on the big data side. As the "software defined data center," a buzz-phrase that has become rather sticky in the industry, evolves, "[the idea] is to deliver performance without killing yourself on cost per gigabyte," Tucci was quoted in an article published by CRN. "If you design the software properly, you can do it."

According to the executive, the opportunity is not so much in structured data, but in the messy, unorganized data and the possibility to analyze and mine it. Those massive amounts of data present a huge opportunity for storage providers to offer not just immense capacity but capable processing engines to handle the data. Jeremy Burton briefly touched on EMC's Project X, which is believed to be a high-performance flash storage array that could be unveiled sometime next year.

"The beauty of this project is that we can start to rethink the storage array from first principles," Burton said, but revealed few other details. "Think about a storage array designed specifically for flash."

EMC's strategy is based on the forecast that data generation is growing much faster than any component of IT at this time, including networking, computing and storage capacity. The company believes that the "data universe" will reach 35 zettabytes - 35 trillion gigabytes - within a decade.

Wolfgang Gruener is a contributor to Tom's IT Pro. He is currently principal analyst at Ndicio Research, a market analysis firm that focuses on cloud computing and disruptive technologies, and maintains the conceivablytech.com blog. An 18-year veteran in IT journalism and market research, he previously published TG Daily and was managing editor of Tom's Hardware news, which he grew from a link collection in the early 2000s into one of the most comprehensive and trusted technology news sources.